Quantum FM radio for Quantum Computing

School of Physics Colloquium: Prof. David Schuster, University of Chicago

Individual superconducting qubits have seen impressive improvements in nearly all aspects over the past decade and now sit at the threshold of being able to perform quantum error correction. Scaling to larger numbers of qubits is challenging both in the fundamental aspects of understanding the behavior of large numbers of strongly coupled qubits and in the technical aspects of controlling such systems.

We take a unique approach in which we use a superconducting qubit as a quantum FM radio manipulate individual photons in an array of harmonic oscillators.This allows control with a single qubit's worth of classical hardware and simplifies the process of designing and building large devices.

Further, these techniques are compatible with current brute force scaling efforts and represent a promising avenue to reach hundreds of qubits in the next several years. In this talk, I will describe the architecture and show how parametric control can be used to realize universal quantum logic operations between arbitrary memory modes.